Nearly two weeks ago (June 10, 2015 to be exact), I received some news that has forever altered my life.

But first let me back up to the week before that. June 2 I celebrated my 38th birthday. It was a great birthday. I was at work, but a coworker had scooted away around lunch time (which is nothing unusual), but returned along with half of the office, singing happy birthday with a great big cake for me. It was all done with such warmth and sincerity that it was easily one of my best birthdays. I had people calling and texting me that I hadn’t heard from in awhile. It filled me with such a feeling of being loved and cared about.

This was a welcomed change of pace after an incredibly challenging year both professionally as well as personally. My girl kitty dying, starting a new job after nearly 6 years, moving a month after starting the new job, a series of events that led to me kicking my beloved 19 year old son out of the house and he went to go live with my mom, one of my step dads dying (which hit me harder than I would’ve previously imagined), finding out my dad’s colon cancer had returned, and then having to work triply hard so as to not lose my job right around the Christmas holidays.

Which I did manage to keep, but I paid a steep price for it with my health. After months of dragging my knuckles on the ground I finally went into the doctors and found that I had middle ear infections and was immediately put on round 1 of antibiotics and loaded up with all kinds of other things. I was told that it was probably going to take a 2nd round and that it may take awhile to get better and to just be patient with the process.

I hadn’t taken an actual vacation in over two years, and it was around this time that I realized I was in dire need of some time off. I started to feel very strongly that I wanted . . . needed to take off 2 weeks in June to go see Jay in The Netherlands. It’s been over 3 years since we first met, and my god have we been through some shit together. We weren’t even on speaking terms with each other when I first felt the desire to go see him for a couple of weeks.

I was so worn down by life at this point, that I was able to actually start seeing beyond my own bullshit to my real and true feelings. I had let unimportant things get in the way of our relationship. I wanted to try again. Luckily, he felt the same. I booked the trip and was scheduled to leave June 5th for two weeks. After which, I would have a week at my current job assignment and then scheduled to begin a new assignment on July 1, which I’m very excited about.

This was my life as I knew it leading up to June 10th, in which I found myself sitting next to Jay on the couch when I received the fateful news. And thank god I was, because heaven help me if I had been sitting by myself in my apartment in the Seattle area upon hearing what I did.

I was alerted to the fact that *something* had happened but wasn’t given any details surrounding it. Due to the time difference and the fact that I hadn’t told everyone I was traveling internationally, I woke up to frantic “Are you okay?!” messages from my brother and a missed call from my mother. Initially I remained calm and speculated on what the problem could be, with Jay. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to panic because it was all highly unusual and made no sense.

Right as I was getting ready to wake up all of North America in order to find out what in blue blazes was going on, I received a text from my mother that simply read, “I tried to call. Look up komo news Bjorn Anderson.”

Can I just stop here for a moment and say that these are the absolute last kind of words that a mother ever wants to see?

Something bad had happened to my baby. My boy. I didn’t yet know what, but I did know that it wasn’t going to be happy news such as, “19 year old wins Powerball lottery!”

I imagined a number of horrible things, including a terrible car accident. I was already falling apart, my entire body shaking like a tree in a hurricane, crying and saying no, no, no, no, no not my boy, not my baby . . . Jay grabbing ahold of me and trying to hold me still, letting me know I didn’t have to look yet if I didn’t want to . . . but I had to. I had to know my son’s fate. I had to know if he still lived or if I had lost him.

In the days that followed, I was most haunted by the scene I first saw in the news clip, unable to comprehend it. Watching people on the news I don’t even know, talking about my son. This boy I had given birth to. This young man that I love with all of my heart and that I had spent the last 19 years of my life dedicated to caring for and raising until last September . . . was now being paraded before me in handcuffs and a prison uniform . . . for the attempted murder of my mother.

I’ll leave it up to you to look up the details of their story if you so choose.

I’ve returned to the States, and today I return to work . . . but this will be my final year here.

I’ve lived the majority of my life on my own. Soldiering through crisis after crisis with no one to depend on but myself. But this absolutely crossed a line with me. If it wasn’t for the care, love, patience, and support given to me by Jay and his family . . . I wouldn’t still be here. Maybe in body . . . but me . . . the soul and spirit inside of me, would no longer be in this world.

It was made very clear to me that my new home is there and where I belong now. I’ve returned only to start wrapping my life up here and to give time for us to make all of the necessary arrangements and planning.

My main reason for sharing what’s happened in this way is because I’d rather get it all out in the open for everyone to see. I want my friends, coworkers, and family to all be aware of this huge transition that I am in because I don’t want to be isolated by it. I don’t want to feel like I have to hide this big secret from everyone and be alone in it.

I don’t want to be isolated from any of you due to my sorrow and grief, which allows me to also openly share with you my joy and happiness of my upcoming wedding and move overseas. These things have always gone hand in hand in my life. A paradox of simultaneous deep grief and unbridled joy.

There’s no reason for me to hide any of it, as they are both a part of life. I wish to share both with you, so that no part of me has to hide in the darkness anymore and feel lonely.

Although, much of that loneliness has already been alleviated by my soon to be husband, Jay. We’ve begun to move in sync with each other, switching my worldview to one centered in *us* instead of *I*. This is brand new for me. I’ve never known this feeling before. I feel that it really suits me. I feel like it’s something that I’ve been longing for and missing all along.

In the coming days, weeks, months I wish to openly share this transition. This bittersweet goodbye to an old life and hello to a new life. A death and rebirth in mid-swing.

I’ve zeroed in on the moment it happens. The moment in which I’m interacting with someone and I lose myself. I need to anchor this in myself so that I can be more aware and lessen how often I do it.

When I am centered and in balance with myself, and I say something to someone from a sincere and open place, and their response sounds like I offended them in some way (here’s that moment) instead of staying solid in what I was actually meaning, feeling, and experiencing when I said whatever I did . . . I instead try to right the misunderstanding.

Which means . . . I end up focusing on their perception of what I meant regarding what I said, instead of what I actually meant. It only takes me a few moments of trying to do this, trying to explain or understand where the disconnect happened between me and another person, before I lose sight myself of what I had really meant.

After an extended period of time, I’m so focused on how what I say may be mistook by that person or persons, that I am no longer centered in myself and balanced. I’m actually thinking the way that they think for longer periods of time in an attempt to avoid conflict and hurt. I start to adopt their attitude and view of life.

It weaves such a tangled and confusing web in my life that I am forced to work through in order to find myself again. Always swearing with a fierceness and a vengeance that if I ever find my way back to myself again, that I will never, ever, ever do that to myself again. I get so furious at myself for being such a ding-a-ling.

I’m not thinking that it’s their own darkened perception that they projected onto my words, I’m not thinking that in order for them to see what I actually meant, means they’d have to admit they were wrong as well as own their darkened perception . . . I’m not thinking any of that. All I’m thinking is, “Oh noes! That’s not what I meant, I’m so sorry you took it that way (as if I had any control over that) and I’ll do better in the future to communicate myself more clearly!”

I’d say that is a pretty fair example of what it means to be naïve.

What I must integrate and better understand about myself, is to stay in myself with how I know I feel and experience something. If I said something from a pure place, and I know within myself whether I’m truly doing that or not, there’s no use in lying to myself, then I need to stay strong in that no matter how someone else responds or sees it.

I can’t let other people decide for me what it is that I meant by what I did or said. I also cannot focus on the distorted way they saw me without risking becoming that distortion.

That more clearly illustrates what it means to me when I say, “I believe in myself.” It means I’m not believing in other’s distortion or projections of me. I believe in what I know to be true about me.

I’m reading through this and I can see how it seems a little one sided, like I’m always the innocent one being wronged by others. That is not true. I see myself in these other things too. I started off by saying “When I am centered and in balance with myself”. The post is describing the moment where I stray, where I lose myself.

Once I’ve gone off the rails, I then fall into the bucket of “other”. I begin doing those less than desirable things myself. I would say that the single hardest moment in the healing process, is the moment when you realize that to some degree, at some level . . . you yourself have done the very things that others did that hurt you.

It won’t look the same on the outside at all. But it’s the realization that the same mechanisms are at play within yourself as well. It is the most humbling and yet liberating thing I have ever experienced. The truth really does set you free.

So no, I’m not blind to how these things play out in me as well, but my focus at this time is in being smarter about not going off of the rails in the first place. The rest of it becomes irrelevant if I stay centered and balanced within myself to begin with. (I needed to say all of that to balance the energy in the post and in my head.)

I felt more of myself come through during this video than I’ve felt in a very long time. My god did it feel good to get out. There was a full hearted, present, and enthusiastic dance that ensued through my house for a little while afterwards (with music of course), moving that Aries energy through me.

Reaching this part of me felt like fresh oxygen getting into my body. It was magnificent. When I feel like this, when I feel like me, I don’t give a flying french fry what anyone thinks about it because it’s from my heart. I know and feel it so deeply within me that it doesn’t matter if I was criticized and told I was wrong by every individual on the planet. That’s when I know I’m being true to self.

This is SO much closer to the real me. This is what I’ve been trying to get at and un-repress. It’s just now surfacing and so there will be a few more bumpy trial and errors as I adjust, just like it took a little bit at the beginning of this video for me to really get there). This was me starting to pierce through my Pluto & Saturn in my chart, through my fears/terrors – as well as my Chiron (deepest wound).

True healing takes discipline. It takes dedication, sincerity, and courage. Strength. Similar to exercise, you only get out of it what you put into it.

I am referring to mental, emotional, psychological healing, although I imagine that extreme physical rehabilitation, such as learning how to walk again, is a very similar journey.

From my teens into my late twenties I struggled with severe depression and anxiety. I also had Complex PTSD (C-PTSD), which is not an official recognized mental disorder according to the American Psychiatric Association, but I feel that is to do with technicalities in definition and nothing to do with whether it exists or not. As I tried to figure out what was wrong with me that made it nearly impossible to function as a contributing member of society, I also ran into suggestions from specialists of being on the autistic spectrum, being a highly sensitive person, potentially bi-polar, and I was officially diagnosed with ADD.

I had my first nervous breakdown at 19. I was already a divorced single mom. My son’s dad (ex-husband) was already gone by then, and never did return despite the joint-custody agreement, and so in my mind I didn’t have the luxury of falling apart. My son was still just a baby and needed me. I truly believe that I still exist in this world today due to him, because he gave me a solid reason to not give up. Through the years, no matter how shattered I was in pain, no matter how desperate my situation . . . and there were many of those . . . never did I reach a state where I could abandon my son to this world and leave him alone.

But I lived in hell within myself. Daily I was tortured. There were years where I was just trying to survive from minute to minute. Breathe Jenn . . . take another breath. Now do it again. Again.

In my late twenties, as I hit my Saturn Return, it felt like my entire physical, mental, & emotional being hit a brick wall (which is very Capricorn/Saturn-like). It was triggered when my son, who was just turning 12 at the time, spent a week in the hospital for suicide watch. (I also had Pluto transiting my MC/Midheaven.)

I had only thought I suffered before that. What followed next had me begging for the days I knew before.

I had thought that I had worked hard enough, suffered, and sacrificed myself enough, to spare my son the same pain that I lived in. But I was given a wake up call and shown just how very wrong I was as I sat there in shock signing papers to admit him into the hospital. Everything I thought I knew and understood about life got flipped upside down that night.

I had barely been making it, but as long as my son was doing well and thriving, I could handle it. But he wasn’t doing so well, was he? Now what? I had no guidance or manual for what to do. I had done everything I knew to get this far . . . where did I go from there?

We had just gotten new kittens the week before . . . Raven and Gir. They were from a shelter and they were both temporarily on antibiotics that I had to give. I remember when first returning home after they admitted my son, trying to pull myself together enough to make sure the kittens got their medicine. I couldn’t handle anymore bad news, anymore feelings of loss, or being out of control and so it felt like at least with this I had control of something.

So I put into them, focused on them the care and love and kindness I was needing myself. They became my focal point, my anchor, to keep my shit together while I tried to make sense of my newly shattered world. To those of you who are regular readers, you’ll remember that it was this time last year almost to the day . . . that I got that fateful call from the vet to hear that my Raven girl was in stage 4 renal (kidney) failure and died shortly afterwards on May 5th. Cinco de Mayo. Perhaps it makes a little more sense now why that was so devastating to me. She came into my life the week before everything I knew fell to pieces and was the glue that held me together through the next 7 years.

But what she did was start the process of removing that same focus from my son, and helped me transition from using him as an anchor and reason for living . . . to finding that anchor and reason for living within myself so that my son would be free to go live his own life without me falling apart or losing my reason to live. This last year since her death is the first year without my training wheels. My first year of trying to live for my own sake and not the sake of my mother, or my son, or any substitute outside of me And it’s been hard.

That first night that I came home after admitting my son into the hospital for the first time, I remember being in a daze. I also remember calling my consciousness to me so that I didn’t black out. I had already gone through so much discipline trying to pull myself together to be the best mom I could despite being so broken inside. I had already learned to not run from the pain, to not run from whatever situation was unfolding in front of me. I had enough faith in myself and the universe to know that this was all happening for a good reason, even if I didn’t understand what that reason was. I knew instinctively that this was a blessing in disguise, and so I took a deep breath and with eyes wide open . . . I walked straight into my pain to see what message waited for me there.

And as I said, it was like walking into a brick wall. In a flash I saw visuals of images from throughout my life, I heard all of the things said in my childhood that never quite made any sense, I felt the repressed and suppressed (one is done consciously, one is not) feelings and emotions that had led me to that moment right there. I was in a flurry of scenes, sounds, and feelings and all of the connections between them that summed up the root causes of my pain and suffering. Including a therapist who my mom had taken me to when I was 8 years old and was so frustrated with me because I refused to cooperate and take his questions seriously (I honestly had no idea what he was trying to get me to talk about), told me that if I didn’t deal with the things I had been through then one day when I was about 30 it was all going to come out at once and I’d have to deal with it then. Which I thought, and may have even said, that’s good . . . I’ll deal with it then.

So there I was, around age 30, and all of this stuff suddenly unlocked in me. I then knew why it had to be like that, why it had to wait until I was older. All of these things were too much for a young girl to handle and process. They were beyond little girl me. I had to build enough life experience, as well as build enough emotional strength and discipline just to reach the point of being able to handle knowing and remembering what little girl me went through.

Only then could the real healing process begin. I cracked wide open. I went through the “My whole life has been a lie” period where the very foundation of your life gets ripped from underneath you and you don’t have anything solid to anchor or orient your life to. And it’s not that my life had been a lie necessarily, but little girl me was incredibly creative and resourceful and so she painted my life in the way that she needed to in order to survive until she was strong enough to face it and heal from it.

The next couple of years were the hardest of my life. It felt like I had acid burning and running through my veins 24/7. I felt like someone had peeled my skin off of my body and my nerves were completely exposed to the elements. I was in overwhelming, excruciating physical pain. The diagnosis being batted around at that time were things like Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I reached a point of not being able to walk. I had to use a cane for a little while. Mentally I was pushed into moments of true insanity from the toll of everything.

I used to be concerned with my sensitivities, such as seeing visuals and hearing things, etc. that I might be crazy. But I am VERY clear now that there is a big difference between true insanity and being sensitive (or psychic if you wish), although there is a thin line between the two if you are not on top of your shit. I cannot emphasize enough how foolish it is to try and force that state for recreational purposes without some sort of discipline, or training, guidance, and a healthy dose of respect for what you are doing. I never needed drugs to have those experiences, and during the periods where I temporarily lost those abilities, I can understand why people do use drugs to reach it . . . there’s a kind of desperate feeling of being disconnected from Sprit. It’s horrible. In my current understanding of things, it is the root cause of all addictions. Trying to regain connection with Spirit. Whether drugs, sex, alcohol, etc. It temporarily opens you back up in your body and allows that connection to take place, and it feels so good because that is more of our natural state.

When you become overwhelmed with hurt and pain (guilt, shame . . . choose your poison), that connection starts to dim and gets covered up and you start to never feel good. So then you start to use artificial things to try and help you feel good such as food, shopping, reading, partying, drinking, etc. But it never sticks . . . it never stays. Why? Because you’re trying to shortcut straight through your pain and hurt without actually dealing with the issues. Which brings me back to: True healing takes discipline. It takes dedication, sincerity, and courage.

Do you want to continue depending solely on temporary fixes for fleeting moments of feeling good, or are you willing to put in the hard work and dedication needed to make the feeling permanent and long lasting? Because I’m here to tell you, I don’t care what label or diagnoses has been laid at your feet, I don’t care how bleak or hopeless you think your cause is . . . it can be overcome. I have overcome many supposedly impossible things. I have personally walked this road. There is a way through. You are not doomed to your diagnosis. You are not doomed to suffer the rest of your life. You have a choice. It’s not easy, and not everyone is at a stage in their life where they have the strength to take this journey. But knowing the universe like I do based on observations and personal experience, if you’ve found your way into my life . . . to my words . . . then you are at that stage. You have what it takes to find your way through.

In every generation, there are the pioneers and those that lead the way to something new. Like the pioneers who went west in the early US. Their life was hard. Many died trying to make the journey. They suffered and paid a great price just for the opportunity for a better life. With those first few, came a few more. Then railroads, roadways, airplanes. Now how hard is it to reach the West? How much does a person have to sacrifice and suffer to access it?

This is the same. It is the unknown, and so it seems dark and scary. We make a bigger monster out of it as a whole, because it scares us. What current average person isn’t scared of a Psycho or Socio Path? Who doesn’t cringe and start backing away slowly from Schizophrenia and Bi-Polar? Who doesn’t look at Autism as being a shame and in some form tragic? How many look down upon addicts or mental patients? Do you see our learned attitude about these things? Yes psychology has made great leaps in mental/emotional health, but it is still not being seen for what it truly is and so the solution is equally difficult to see.

We hurt and we suffer because something is out of balance or not right. When it’s something that is out of balance or not right in the culture or society as a whole, it emerges as mental disorders and diseases. If it is increasing each year, a false belief or something not aligned with natural law, is spreading or worsening. And for as long as the group insists on running from the truth instead of actually dealing with the things they should be dealing with in the way they should be dealing with it, openly and honestly, instead of being distracted by nonsense and bullshit . . . it will continue to worsen before it gets better.

It worsens and spreads until there isn’t a single person that isn’t affected by it in some way. Until people can no longer say, “Everything is fine.” Until people are suffering from it so much, and after trying everything they can currently think of that is allowed within the current paradigm of thinking, it eventually leads them to a place where they’d do anything in order to make it alright again. Including praying, maybe for the first time in their life. Swallowing their pride. Being humbled. Realizing maybe they don’t know everything, maybe they don’t have as much control over things as they thought. In those moments a person either opens their heart or they snap completely. Have you noticed the increase in people losing their shit in recent years? We are at that breaking point both as a collective and as individuals.

We are in uncharted territories. We cannot currently rely on outer authority to help truly navigate these waters because the authorities aren’t *out there* yet . . . they are just now coming into being. They are being shaped, formed, and refined as we speak, by the very horrors our world is being forced to live through. These are not individual sins we are dealing with, they are collective sins. Things that over generations of time, individuals let get so out of hand instead of dealing with them, that they are now all of our problems. But at the same time it’s all we’ve ever known and so we’re blind to them.

We are the modern day pioneers, and our unknown territory is the human psyche. To be a true pioneer, you must have a warrior heart. You must find the strength and courage to walk alone. You must be an adventurer, you must be curious. You must be sincere. You must do it for something bigger than you. It can’t just be for you alone, or you won’t find the needed strength and motivation to get through the darkest nights. You have to take calculated risks and chances. You have to be willing to keep going and trying no matter how many of your ideas fail or don’t work out. You have to risk looking a fool and being made fun of.

You have to be willing to let yourself crack open and fall apart. You have to be willing to let go of everything you believed to be true up until that point. And not in an endless mindless woe is me way, but consciously. What do I mean by that?

Imagine you have before you a path of burning coals, and you just happened to be barefoot. The bed of coals before you is only about 10 feet in length. It’s too far for you to jump, and suddenly there’s a wall behind you and two walls alongside you and the path. You must walk barefoot over the path. This is very much what it’s like when having to face down one of your inner demons which are like the gatekeepers that test you to see if you’re allowed to pass through or if you need to repeat some lessons. Your choices are to stand there for eternity making the same mistakes, or start learning how to walk on fire and burn the darkness out of you that clouds and weighs you down with burden. When I say consciously, I mean you purposefully and intentionally step onto those burning coals and you let whatever sensation you feel, come through you without trying to fight it or make it stop. Let it happen.

You do not close your eyes, you do not try to pretend you are somewhere else, you do not run. It is a decision, a resolve deep inside that you will do whatever it takes to make your way through. And as you take each step, and you initially feel that excruciating burn, you use the only resource you have at your disposal and that is your internal guidance. You must stay aware and breathing and open in order to know what needs to be done. If you panic, if you let yourself freak out about your situation in any way, you make it that much worse for yourself. That much more painful. You have to walk the coals anyways, so you might as well figure out a way to endure it.

Because something happens in a human when they are tested to this degree and they are not so rigid that they break. A transformation takes place. Blocks, things that are stuck, worn out beliefs, things that are not true . . . are forced from the person’s being. In that situation, you have no room or time for ANY bullshit because you need everything you have to focus on what’s happening in that moment. When you refuse to run and you refuse to black out or lose consciousness or awareness, you give the darkness no choice but to flee because that’s where the burning and pain comes from. It forces it to leave, and then you are left with only what is real and pure . . . You. And I promise you, when the last of what isn’t true leaves you, the pain and suffering within you will cease. You will have learned the firewalker’s secret for walking over burning coals without being harmed.

It can happen quickly, within moments. It could happen slowly over years. It depends on a number of things, but mostly on how resistant you are to let go of what you think you know and what you believe to be true that isn’t actually true. How stubborn, how prideful are you? How open are you to learning? How much does it mean to you that what you believe is right be right? And suffering for years walking over the burning coals does not earn you extra brownie points. It should not be considered a badge of honor. “Yeah, I’ve suffered 20 years longer than you, so I am probably wiser than you about these things.” Uh. No. That’s not how it works. If you haven’t started to find your way out, if you haven’t continued to get closer to that state of peace and happiness in you for longer periods of time through (what seems like) superhero efforts, then you’re doing something greatly in error and you’re the last person I or anyone should be taking advice from unless we wish to learn how to be perpetually stuck. It’s not something to be ashamed of either, because this is a fluffing hard ass path to take . . . but it takes more than just walking it to truly understand where you are and what’s going on.

To get more out of this path, you have to walk slowly, purposefully, and consciously. The point is not to simply get past it and then recover, because it is not the only fire pit that you will be facing on this journey. And it’s also not the point of the fire pits. When you’ve truly learned through personal experience the point of them, and you put in the hard work it takes to slowly, consciously, and open-heartedly walk across them to the point that you not only stop fearing them, but look forward to them . . . then you will have begun to reach the place I call Healed. Being whole within yourself.

It is a state of grace. It is when a human is re-centered properly in themselves and they are able to hold open and stay in connection with their Spirit, Soul, as well as the Divine . . . at all times. It is a life without fear, a life without addiction, and no longer being a slave to your senses or ego. From that state you live and know the Truth and nature of things. Your eyes and ears are wide open, your heart is wide open and you are fully protected and safe. You know in the deepest depths of your being that you are okay . . . you are safe. It’s beyond faith, beyond knowing you are safe and protected, beyond praying, hoping, and wishing you are protected . . . you are in the active state of always being safe and protected. It’s not even a topic of discussion or a question in your mind. It would be like asking if there is still oxygen in the air for your lungs . . . it gets to that level of silly.

The world, the physical world around you, literally shimmers as golden light. And when you zoom your focus in on it, you see . . . you feel . . . you know . . . it’s conscious light. You understand creation at a whole new level that you cannot see, cannot experience, and cannot know while you insist on staying small, hurt, and broken.

So if you haven’t reached that place, if you haven’t experienced that state of being while conscious and awake in your human body . . . then you are not done yet. You have not reached the place you seek and you must keep going. Keep trying, keep growing, keep learning. Learn about love, learn about truth, learn about who you really are inside and not what you’ve been led to believe. You are not doomed to suffer your whole life, not if you truly, genuinely, and sincerely are done with it. You are not cursed and you are not fated to be miserable because of any set of circumstances that have or will happen in your life. You can overcome. You will have restrictions, you will have challenges, but they are there to strengthen your weaknesses that are needed in order to successfully navigate this journey . . . not to punish you.

There is so much more to life than what we’ve been taught . . . in fact Life doesn’t truly begin until you reach that place. It’s worth all of the hard work and frustration. Not only is it worth it, it’s what is needed most right now. The more people who make this journey and reach the desired destination, the easier it will be for others to reach it as well. The more people who reach it, the more support we all have, the stronger we become, and then the easier it will be for others to make the journey when their time comes. Before you know it, people will be able to fly airplanes there. 😀

Can you imagine such a world, such a future? Where we are healed and whole both as individuals and as a species? What could humanity accomplish in such a world?

What if all you were asked to do in this life to play a part in bringing that future about, was to find the courage, strength, and faith to truly heal yourself. To overcome your circumstances and to rise from the ashes? To find it in you to overcome, to do what they said couldn’t be done. To become a firewalker?

It is precious, it is a blessing to be capable of loving another human being outside of yourself. To be able to experience that in life. It means that you’ve opened up to love within yourself, despite the world. To love, to be loved at this point in time is a fight that is well won.

We are all currently carrying the burden of our ancestors’ collective choices, both good and bad. It is becoming increasingly rare for an adult to stay in a place of love for any significant length of time. Why we continue to choose to see a person who has lost the ability to love as something evil or despicable is beyond me, when it’s quite simply become our reality. Seeing it with such closed and hateful eyes only serves to make it harder for us to see where we are standing so that we can walk to higher ground. And truthfully, it’s really hard to feel anything without also feeling the bombardment of madness exploding globally.

But it does feel shameful, doesn’t it? I mean, who wants to admit that they are numb or frozen to feeling something that is such a necessity to existence and what we associate with what it means to be a good person? Quite frankly, it’s embarrassing. To say, “I don’t or can’t feel love.” feels like a death sentence, doesn’t it? People start imagining serial killers and rapists. God, who wants to be thrown in with that lot? Amiright?

So good people who start to fall more and more out of love and more and more into fear, convince themselves that they do still feel love, even if it’s just memories of having felt it because there’s just no way they’re going to admit otherwise. They’re feeling like holy hell inside, but can convince even themselves that they’re right as rain. Denial is a slippery slope my friends, and fear is it’s lover.

When you are running from something inside of you and you’re scared to the point that it’s become a full time occupation, you aren’t in a place of love, plain and simple. When fear has taken you over, when it has become your belief system and your reality, it rules you. It lies to you. It makes you think and believe things that are absolutely not true.

It is painful to see a loved one go through that fight, believing that they aren’t (or shouldn’t be) loved and the endless ways in which that can be expressed. It can be so painful, that if you don’t watch yourself, you will start to lose your own belief in love.

It will slowly bleed out of you in your effort to convince your loved one that they are loved (no, but wait, I can prove it to you) and the endless ways in which that can be expressed.

I’ve been through this fight many, many times. After every setback, rallying myself back together and determined to not lose the fight. I love you. I still love you. I will always love you. I will not let fear win.

But for a time . . . it did.

I have known no worse suffering in my existence, than in the times in which I forgot that love is real.

I’ve returned from there. I do know and feel love again. I fought with every cell in my body and beyond to come back to that place of love, to be once again capable of giving and receiving it. I’m in the process of learning how to protect that precious feeling inside of me in relation to others. How to not let it get drained away like it did before by trying to give it endlessly to those who have decided for themselves that they don’t deserve it, but at the same time not feeling like that means that I’m condemned to live a loveless existence myself.

I will say it again, it is a blessing . . . a gift to be able to give and receive love despite the world today. I had no idea how rare it was until I lost it. So now that I have it back, you can bet that I’m going to fight like a coked-up Lioness for the right to keep that part of me.

If a loved one has decided to believe more in their falseness than in their truth, that is their right. Maybe to test themselves, like one of life’s many rites of passages. Sometimes you need to be dropped into hot water to know what you’re really made of, so that you don’t live a limited and less than full expression of self in life. If we don’t get pushed off of the ledge every so often, how else will we remember that we have wings? (If you think you don’t have wings, then you are probably past due for a ledge shove.)

For me, when a loved one of mine has gone into that place, I’ve become committed to let them go on their own and awayfrom me because it is something that only they can choose to return from just as I had to choose for myself. I would much rather use that time to grow in my strength and in my love, than to fall into the hole with them and we both become stuck. In doing this, choosing to stay in myself and in love, I can be standing strong still should they choose to return to the land of the living and need a desperate reminder of what love looks and feels like.

I’m coming to see it as my job and responsibility to not let the expression of love die or be forgotten in my life. I take my job very seriously. It’s the city of tough love and I’m the baddest bitch in town. (<– My gansta rapper persona)

Hey you know what? I remembered something very important to me today. So like if I say something that is true for me in a state of centeredness or true deep joy, and someone shows up in my sphere of existence and is in a very unhealthy self absorbed way and mistakes what I was actually saying . . . like there’s not a fluffing thing I can do about it. There’s what I was actually experiencing and feeling, and then there’s the unhealthy person’s projection on me. No matter how self conscious or responsible I try to be in what I say, people are going to take the most innocent things and warp and twist that shit into something it’s not and try to hand it to me as “truth”.

There are so many complexities that are not being taken into consideration when they do that. There is how something feels and is experienced when your heart is opened, and then there’s the darker and heavier version of someone who is shut down or collapsed into themselves. You can’t take someone’s open hearted flow of words and apply closed heart logic to it and call it truth or fair. If you’re closed, whether you wish to admit it or not, you are not going to understand what I’m really meaning or saying so you can just shut the hell up and get off my site. I have this many –> 0 fucks to give you.

I’ve done said that if you think your shit don’t stink then you can GTFO and I mean it. I’ve had it with you narcisstic self absorbed, NO INTEREST in actually getting your life and shit together, endless excuse it’s never my fault, irresponsible for your own self and choices, I’m just interested on looking like I know what I’m talking about, false humility mother fuckers. Fuck you.

You make it hard for people to tell the difference between genuine people and people who are just fronting. You confuse the youth from understanding the difference between going through the motions and actually feeling and living it. You spread falseness like a disease. You waste people’s time, energy, and resources with your bullshit. Good people. People who are genuine and don’t deserve that kind of treatment. Shame on you!

Wanting everything to be “fair”. Wanting your bullshit to be treated as fair and equal as someone else’s genuineness? How about no. When you’re standing in genuineness, bullshit is pretty damn obvious . . . but when you’re standing in bullshit, you think everyone is standing in bullshit and not anymore “right” than you and therefore you’re equal. Well, it’s not! No matter how much you want to be in the right and don’t want to let the truth into your fractured and distorted reality, it doesn’t mean that it gets to be right and forced as a truth.

But Jenn, what makes you think you’re not doing that right now? Because I know what both sides look like because I DID the real and hard work of taking an honest look at myself. That shit has taken over a decade of hiding myself away from the world and moving through excruciating self honesty and not letting myself get away with ANY bullshit and taking responsibility for myself and everything going on in my life, even when it wasn’t actually my fault.

I didn’t sit there proclaiming to the world around me how I was taking care of myself and doing right by me and how I don’t need no man and the million of things people say trying to convince themselves that they’re actually taking action for their lives when they’re not. Because when you really are doing what needs to happen to pull your life together, you don’t have time, energy, or even a fuck to give about how other people see you or what they’re thinking about you. You are heads down and actually taking care of shit, not talking about it.

If this is something that you really have done in your life, then you are not going to have a single issue with me or what I say. You aren’t going to have a need to “call me out”. You are going to have compassion and understanding of others and not be so quick to judge. You give people chances even if they don’t deserve it. You actually care, not by meaningless words but by an energy that emits from you that people who are closed up and blind can’t feel or detect even if their life fucking depended on it.

If you haven’t done this work, you could stand to shut up and listen to those of us who have. You might actually learn something.

I really needed that temper tantrum. I needed to feel my fire once again. Fire is a purifier. It challenges. It tests. Trial by fire.

I then know where and how I’ve gone astray from my Self by what is hurting and burning in me in the aftermath. It allows me the opportunity to become aware of it and face it, because only what is false will hurt and burn.

It makes it easier for me to see what is True and what’s okay to let go of. I remember that I have nothing to truly be afraid of because what is Real and True cannot be destroyed or harmed ever.

Beyond this physical realm, beyond what our physical eyes can see, resides the True Form of everything you can see here (and even things that are not here . . . yet). The more we’re in alignment with it, the more visible and real it becomes to us. The more out of alignment we are with it, the more distant it becomes.

The longer we go out of alignment with it, the harder it becomes to believe in it’s existence. It becomes stories passed down through time. Stuff of myth and legend. Fairytales.

The less we believe as individuals, the less we start to believe as a whole and the more disconnected and out of balance with nature we become.

All pain, hurt, suffering, diseases, and sickness stems from being out of alignment with our True Forms.

It comes from believing more in what is Not True than in the True Forms.

These True Forms, when struck or expressed, hum out in a single unique vibration. It is the signature or “name” for that being. It is how all other beings know it separately from all other beings.

At this level, the energetic signature that it vibrates and hums and expresses in unlimited ways, is not subjective. It is recognized as it actually is by all, and not skewed by false perceptions. There is nothing that anyone can say or do that will stop or change the True Forms from being what they are. Nothing.

Not even our disbelief in them. All that happens when we stop believing in them, is that we forget them. (Not the other way around.) We increase the distance between where we are and where we want to go. We are all in various degrees of remembering and forgetting these True Forms.

That is where my allegiance is. That is where I aim my Sagittarius Arrow and shoot towards.

When I become aware of parts of my True Form while in my current life, it is a non-negotiable, non-debatable part of me. While yes, many people here may have any number of opinions about what they personally think about those parts of me, unless it matches the Truth of my True Form, their opinions and/or feelings are wrong.

Your Truth is universally recognized by all other Truths. It is not a case of you are in Your Truth, but George over there in His Truth looks over at Your Truth and says, “Nah.”

My loved ones tend to scuba dive in their False Forms. They can become so disconnected from their True Forms, they forget that their current False Form isn’t who they really are. They become so filled with fear they close down and cut off or turn away from their connection to their Soul. When you become anxiety-ridden and afraid, you tense your body immensely and it doesn’t allow the flow of energy from spirit to move through you and to nourish you.

We all do this at some point and to some degree. But some choose to actively work through it (or healing), and some choose to call it home and live in it their whole life.

When you are closed down like this, you are not in touch with your own true feelings. It’s not possible. You have to be open and receptive with warmth and trust in life in order to feel your own true feelings. You have to do a lot of digging and soul searching with brutal honesty and endless forgiveness of yourself and others as you move through your pain. There has to be a softness and compassion and understanding for not just yourself but others outside of you as well. A wider perspective of life and your places in it.

Being emotional, including crying, does not mean that you are in touch with your own true feelings. Many things are habitual or conditioned learning. We all carry the burdens and sins of our ancestors with us that we have to break through to get beyond them and reach our own true feelings. So many things that we think are our feelings, are False Forms. They are not from our True Forms, and that causes us pain and sorrow in life for as long as we insist on believing them to be True.

Some people mistake their thoughts and opinions as being feelings. They live in their heads and are completely out of touch with their bodies and believe their own thoughts about feelings to be their actual feelings. This can often times stem from trauma and trying to flee or escape their bodies and can’t quite get all of the way out through the crown chakra and so they stay in the head area near the doorway so they can flee at a moments notice when things get too real.

However, what happens is that they’re never present (full of fire) within themselves and their physical body doesn’t trust them to be there for it when it needs them and so it goes into a perpetual ‘fight or flight or freeze’ stance and becomes anxiety ridden amongst many other health issues. If they can learn to not be so scared of life and actually start to allow their presence into the rest of their body, relax and move out of a place of fear, they would find that it’s much, much more comfy and warm and anxiety free. But my point being, those thoughts about thoughts are not their own true feelings.

Fear is a pretty motivated force. It can blow things way out of proportion. It absolutely blinds you and seems to work against you in seeing your own True Form. It also likes to pretend that it’s not there. It shows itself in other ways such as always being on guard, being defensive, being too quiet and small and never raising your voice, aggression, illness, laziness, apathy . . . on and on I could go. I think the most damaging thing about Fear, is how it makes you believe that it is absolutely True. And that is a Lie. That is the Great Deception that we have all fallen for.

When you are standing in your True Form it is easier to recognize when others are standing in their True Form and when they’re not. When you are not standing in your own Truth, it’s much harder to know the difference.

It takes great strength and courage to stand in your Truth by yourself, especially around those you love. I so easily want to cave in on myself and go along with their Non-Truth just so that I don’t have to be alone, but I always pay a high price for it and it’s not worth it anymore.

So my recent post was to establish for myself that I do get to stay in that place of love. That I have the strength and will to stand alone in my love for myself and them even if they have forgotten themselves. I don’t have to listen to their Fear or Falseness or let it influence me. I don’t even have to let them into my life. I don’t have to go through life feeling guilty or ashamed for being a terrible daughter or mother when there’s nothing more I can do about it on my end. In that I get a choice.

I’m in a nice and fiery mood today. A no nonsense mood. An ‘I’ve had enough bullshit for one lifetime, please and thank you’ mood.

Not an angry mood. Not a defensive mood. Not an ‘I’m not putting up with other people and cutting them out of my life’ mood.

A feeling of getting fired up and clear-headed. Shaking the sleep and cobwebs out of my head. Pushing the sludge out and the oxygen into my veins. Taking in a huge deep breath to help me sit up taller, fuller, and to be more alert to the world around me.

You’ve heard of the boiled frog theory, right? The idea that if you put a frog into a pan of water and heat it up slowly enough over time, that the frog will not notice the temperature change and eventually boil to death. It’s to illustrate how we can become conditioned to increasing dangers over long periods of time.

I feel like we’re a bunch of frogs currently boiling to death in bullshit.

I feel that people as a whole have lost their center of gravity and as a result, they are losing their effing minds.

Just because a person is entitled to their opinion, doesn’t mean they are right. Just because a person is confident in what they are saying, doesn’t mean it’s the truth. Just because someone has scientific research to back up their opinion, doesn’t mean it is a fact. Just because something has the backing of a lot of people, doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

This era of political correctness, awareness, equality, and fairness for every teeny, tiny little thing has gone completely off of the deep end.

So has this stupid, STUPID (oh noes, here comes the ‘Committee for the Rights of Stupid People’) War between Science and Religion that have people on both sides who need to be put in the corner for a time out.

Science is a method in which to observe and learn about our world and existence. Our world and existence is far beyond and bigger than Science has had time to observe and learn about. Science is limited and it is SMALLER than our world and existence, so do not try to shove all of existence into that small box and try to tell me that that’s all there is, because it is not.

I like and I respect science, but it is NOT the end all be all and I will most certainly not allow it to overwrite something I know to be otherwise in my heart. Science is not a replacement for our consciousness and our feelings. It has its purpose and it has its place, and it needs to be kept in proper perspective.

Science is just now reaching the outer edges of what I already intrinsically knew and understood as a young child before I got passed through school and was told that those things weren’t possible. Do you know how upsetting it is to be constantly told by smug educated adults that you are wrong and to feel like you’re a bleeping idiot who doesn’t understand the world at all, only to find out decades later that you were right the whole time?

My own voice was drowned out by those that we are taught as children to respect and listen to. And do you know what I’ve learned as an adult? That the ones doing all of the talking and deciding for the rest of us, are mostly faking and bullshitting their way through it. They are so good at making a case, and in sounding confident, and having “proof” to back up their story, that it feels like I have nothing of substance to offer and so I keep quiet.

How many people are out there that know better than the loudmouths running amok and are silenced for similar reasons I’ve kept quiet for so long? People who actually have something worth saying and that people are in great need of hearing, but who feel like there is no point because they wouldn’t be heard among the masses? Or who don’t feel like they would be taken seriously because they just know things. Things they can’t explain and they can’t prove because science hasn’t caught up to them yet?

Things that are fundamental truths that have been lost and that need to be heard so that we can remember ourselves again and pull our shit back together?

I have fought so hard to get to this point, this point right here. Speaking my feelings out loud. I have spent decades finding my courage to say things out loud starting with disciplining myself to start writing in a journal every day. Pushing myself to write things in ink that I was too scared to even allow into my head. Years I spent just doing this, trying to overcome my fear to allow my OWN VOICE to be allowed into my OWN mind!

I used to write caveats and excuses and pages of explanations for an emotional outburst I had weeks before, saying that please if the person ever read my journal, please understand that I was just upset and that really I love you and I hope it didn’t hurt your feelings. It took me years to stop apologizing in my journals for my seeming contradictions where I felt one way one month and then found myself writing something else that seemed to contradict it later. Trying to understand myself, and always sorry for how I was.

Constantly pushing myself to take it to the next level. I started going to discussion boards. Not having the courage to even setup an account, let alone leave a comment. When I finally did, I nearly effing died of embarrassment and humiliation. It took me days to regain control of myself. I felt like I had jumped out of an airplane with no parachute. This also took years of trying and then getting too scared and retreating and then trying again.

Now look at me. I’m blogging my little heart out. I still fall into old habits. I still freak the hell out and have to retreat and work really hard to regain my courage to get back on here and say something, anything. This has not been easy for me. What you are seeing right now is the result of a lifetime of pushing through sheer terror to be heard. This accomplishment is my victory, my triumph in life. The one thing in my life that I did for me and nobody else.

I still don’t always get things written out how I mean them, because fear makes the walls close in on me and my vocabulary and ability to communicate starts to diminish. But goddammit I keep coming back and I keep risking looking like a total idiot and making mistakes and being misunderstood. I fight really hard to not jump back on here immediately after I write a post to apologize for any number of ways my words could be misconstrued.

I reread my own posts many times afterwards until I can let go of the fear of something I said being public and people I don’t even know reading it and forming opinions about me that I have absolutely no control over no matter how unwarranted or unfair it is to me.

But yes . . . there are people out there, maybe even you reading this right now, who have things to say that do need to be heard in the world right now more than ever. The world needs more of the *right* people speaking up. The world needs more thoughtful people with heart to say what they know and feel inside even if it can’t be proven, even if it’s said in a shaky, timid, and insecure voice. Even if you think no one is hearing you . . . please, find the courage to speak it anyways. You don’t know that what you have to say, isn’t the very thing that someone needed to hear in all of the world.

Omg, where did I go? It’s like I fell off the face of the Earth these last couple of months. This was the first time since I started actively writing on this blog, that I skipped an entire month without posting. Sorry, November 2014, you don’t get a place of your own in my archive list. {A moment of silence 😦 }

Now, that’s not to say I didn’t think of you guys, I most certainly did. This place has come to feel like a favorite hangout of mine, and my readers are like all of the cool random people that I run into while at my hangout.

But regardless of whether you’re an extrovert or introvert, highly sensitive or . . . I don’t know . . . what’s the opposite of that? Insensitive? {shoulder shrug}, we all have those times in our lives when things get so intense, we have to kind of withdraw from our usual activities in order to take care of business. And so it was for me.

Are things now less intense for me? Not even close. But there’s no sign of it slowing down, and so I’ve shifted my focus from trying to ‘survive’ it, to pushing myself to the next level and owning it. This isn’t about ‘why me, god?! why me!?’, it’s about, “Hey Jenn. You have a ton of untapped potential. But for some reason, you can’t seem to push yourself enough to be motivated to really get in there, so we’re going to do you a little favor and apply some much needed pressure and challenge so that you are forced to bring your A-Game to life.”

And bravo life, because it’s working.

This last Friday, however, I felt like the universe finally threw me a bone. “Here’s a gold star for your insane efforts these last months, just so you don’t completely give up as we continue to dump truckloads of ‘WTF?’ on your head.”

Things have been so intense, that I had forgotten that Facebook even existed, but on Friday I suddenly felt the need to check it. I saw that I had a new friend request from someone I knew years ago. Plus, an added bonus, it was someone I liked. So I accepted the request, and then suddenly she was messaging me. She was so excited to have found me, which I have to say, there’s no feeling quite like someone being so gosh durn happy to have gotten in touch with you.

But it gets even better.

About 5 years ago, I had done an astrology reading for her. Shortly after this, life called each of us away and we completely lost contact with each other. Anyways, on Friday, she reminded me that I had said during the coming months of that time, she would meet the love of her life. (I’m pretty sure I said she had the ‘potential’ of meeting the love of her life . . . I’m uber cautious like that).

The relationship she was just coming out of at the time had completely imploded in on itself, and oh so much ‘no no no no no’ was happening with it. Now, I’m not the kind of person who will just tell people what I think they want to hear so that they don’t lose hope or give up. In fact, I’d personally be thinking that a relationship was the last thing she needed, and if I remember correctly, she wasn’t interested herself. But I do have a faint memory of seeing a coming transit in her chart that stood out so strong and bright, that despite the current situation feeling to the contrary. . . I shared with her what I saw.

Well . . . it turns out, that around the indicated time, she *did* meet someone. 4 1/2 years later, and they are still together and going strong. She said she had been wanting to get ahold of me to tell me thank you for having opened her up to the possibility, that I had changed her life.

I sat in my seat stunned. I remember my short stint of doing astrology readings for others. I didn’t feel real confident in myself, and I didn’t feel like I was really helping anyone. People would schedule a reading, I’d give it, and then that would be the end of it. In fact, that basically describes my entire life. I feel like I put so much into everything I do . . . then dead silence . . . and then that’s the end of that.

My natal Pluto on the Descendant is a real bastard, let me tell ya. Just seeing the words I used above I can tell you that’s what is at play here. “Dead Silence.” No feedback. No response. I put myself out there over and over, and get no response or ping or reflection from others about myself. It’s just me showing myself, and then that disappears into a black hole known as “Other”.

The Descendant is the Other in our lives. Relationships. It’s naturally ruled by Libra (and Venus). Mine happens to also be ruled by Libra. Relationships in our life are incredibly important because it’s the only way we really get to know ourselves separate from other people. Aries, the Individual Self, is in natural opposition to Libra, the Other. It’s the push and pull between these two, that helps us understand ourselves in relation to others and helps us further refine what we know about ourselves.

If a person were to go their whole life with no human interaction, they would be hard pressed to be able to understand who they were as an individual because there is no compare and contrast. There is nothing to initiate the inner ‘I am this, I am not this’ dialogue.

I know that some of the point of how my natal chart is set up, is to learn to do things for me and because I want to, and not based on other’s response or lack of. But that’s easier said than done.

Because there is nothing like putting your whole heart and soul into a project, and then when finished, all you hear is absolute silence coming from the audience, followed by the quiet shuffle as everyone gets up to leave the theater in an unenthused, quiet, and orderly fashion as if they had just been to a lecture on the benefits of using certain types of soil for the best lawn results. It is so demoralizing. It is incredibly hard to keep up self confidence and inspiration when you’re met with that time and time again.

Btw, that is also my Saturn in Leo in 5th, if you notice the theater verbiage and being ‘orderly’. The words we use to describe things tell us so much more about the situation then we commonly realize.

Pluto is the Lord of the Underworld. Death and Transformation. It is the state a human can become even while alive. They become zombie-like. They lack life. They are essentially dead. They cannot be roused up out of their rut. They are incapable of seeing or entertaining the idea of a world or existence outside of what they view as a cold and cruel world. They’ve given up. They are perpetual victims, never seeing their role in why situations in their life plays out like it does. It’s always other people’s fault. They become like broken records, repeating the same upset and depressing things over and over, year after year. They will gladly take any life you have to give, but will have nothing to give in return because they don’t use what they are given to truly change their lives, only to sustain their current way of life.

That is what I face every day of my life with Pluto on the Descendant. People who have lost their spirit, their will to live, and have let their light go out inside. They have nothing in them to give back, and anything they try to do in order to give the appearance that they are giving back, is just dead and hollow. Compliments don’t mean anything because they are not real or true, they are just what is done because they either want to appear as a good person or appear to have something to give so that people that are carrying light, don’t leave them. They don’t want to be alone in the dark with no light, but they haven’t quite figured out that they need to do somethingto re-ignite their own light instead of trying to steal, capture, hold, possess, etc. someone else’s light as their own.

In order to re-ignite your light after you have let it go out, you have to go through an intense process of death and rebirth while alive (born again anyone?). And if you can’t dig deep and find the strength in you to overcome that test, then you could die for real. Or, you could live out the rest of your life as one of the walking dead who are never happy, but it’s not your fault because life is unfair, and focus all of your time promoting how hard you have it and how it never gets better, instead of putting that energy into making some real changes in your life.

So my light goes into these deep black holes, never to be seen again and never reflecting back to me the light I shine for them. For the longest time, I have also seen myself as a black hole . . . the same as is reflected back to me by these walking dead others. Because they have nothing to give back, and what they do is usually false or fake, I have a hard time trying to convince myself that I’m not that, without feeling deluded.

I do recognize how I can be capable of those same behaviors, especially when I get worn down enough and haven’t been taking good care of myself or enforcing boundaries between me and others like I should. I know what it feels like to be the walking dead, because I have taken many unwilling journeys into the Underworld.

But the big difference between me and those others in my life so far, is that at some point, The Fighter . . . The Warrior in me, all of my Aries Rising, Venus, Mars, South Node . . . surfaces and I fight my way back into the light screaming like an Amazonian Banshee on Fire the entire way. (RAAAWWWWWR!) I gain clarity. I know who I am and who I am not. I rise to the challenge, my swords blazing and cutting through the darkness and shadows. I will not let the darkness put out my precious light for any reason or for any person. I fight for my light, so that I do not become lost and self-absorbed.

There is a distinct difference between taking good care of yourself, protecting yourself, standing up for yourself . . . and only thinking about yourself and acting like you’re the only person on the planet with any problems. One is to protect your own light from being stolen or letting it go out and becoming one of the dead . . . and the other is being one of the dead and taking light from others.

When I do get fired up and my Inner Warrior comes out, I have immense confidence and I definitely do not need anyone’s approval or feedback. But it’s no longer enough for me to just come out guns-a-blazing and mowing down everyone in my path, I must learn how to consistently hold this clarity of my individual self, even while interacting and being completely surrounded by these walking dead. I think ideally, without so much bloodshed.

I’m not entirely sure that I knew what I was signing up for when I came down here. There’s a good reason we are made to forget, until we are strong enough to remember. It’s best that I didn’t know how hard it would be.

How hard it is to climb the stairs to a center stage, knowing that you must perform with your entire heart and soul for there to be any chance of impact at all, but also knowing that you will not be given a sign or any kind of indication of how your performance was viewed or received. Just straight up faith and belief in yourself. Even if you’re the only one in the whole wide world who believes in you, but . . . without getting defensive or closing your heart to that whole wide world.

Although . . as I start to let that part of me show, my heart and soul (and in new experiences of what that even means), the universe rewards me with that rare treat of hearing that I had a real impact on a person’s life. Friday was one of those rare moments, that followed quickly on the heals of me changing how I was interacting with others in my life. Makes me feel like Pavlov’s dog. “You rang the bell, you get a treat.” It freaking works, I’ll tell you what. Never do I feel so motivated to keep pushing through the dark, than when I start hitting definite markers that point to the most direct route out of the Underworld.

So if you happen to see a great big ball of flame whizzing by, screaming like the Furies, swords-a-flying, slicing a pathway through the dark, don’t be alarmed. It’s just Jenn on her daily commute.

A new understanding is forming for myself in regards to my life. Ha. I initially wrote “lie” instead of “life”. My typing fingers think they’re hilarious.

I’m still feeling out the details, but for now the main energies that seem involved in this new understanding for myself, belong to the Leo and Virgo variety. Which makes sense, since transiting Jupiter is currently in Leo and the Sun is currently in Virgo.

There are persons, places, and things (henceforth I will refer to as ‘nouns’) and events (henceforth I will refer to as ‘verbs’) in my life that will take something small and rather unimportant in the big scheme of things, and make it into a 3-ring-circus.

While other nouns and verbs will take things that are actually earth-shattering, and make them into small unimportant no-things. Suffering alone in silence.

The nouns and verbs that take the small pebbles and blow them up to mountain-size, pull a lot of attention and focus to them. Let’s face it, it takes a lot of energy and focus to build mountains with grains of sand. This feels like a Leo energy to me. A flair for the dramatic made fit for the stage.

The nouns and verbs that hide the mountains and pretend they’re tiny grains of sand, feels like the Virgo energy to me. On the healthy side of Virgo, is the energy that goes around taking care of the day-to-day routine things in life that makes everything run smoother, but all of the love and care that they put into everything they do, often go unnoticed by others. On the unhealthy side, or under duress, it can become obsessive compulsive about needing the routine in order to feel okay or being a slave to the routine vs. doing the routine out of open-hearted care, love, and nurturing.

The Leo-ine variety of nouns and verbs can be so caught up in the scene, that they become it. They are very dedicated to their roles. The show must go on after all. It takes over their lives and the lives of anyone who gets assigned a role by them. “You! Yes, you over there. You shall be . . . [insert generic title that is lesser than the Leo-ine role].”

I don’t know if you’ve ever been caught in the headlights of a Leo-ine type, but the warmth of their attention is no nice, so cozy, so heart-warming. Especially if you’ve been more of the Virgo variety and have for the most part gone unnoticed.

But what the Virgo nouns and verbs seem to miss (as they focus on the details), is that the Leo Nouns and Verbs are in the middle of a scene. Breaking character is frowned upon or ignored. You either play it the way they have it scripted, or they don’t want to play with you at all. The Virgo variety will want to help, soothe, heal what ails the Lion. But the scene doesn’t end until the Lion is done with the role he is in the middle of playing, regardless of what anyone does (as long as others are paying attention to him).

Because the dramatic nouns and verbs are so caught up in the scene, they become incapable of seeing outside of themselves and the reality they’ve concocted. They are unaware of how living their lives in the way they do and making the choices they make, affect others. They are unaware of how it is them that is perpetuating it. They are unaware of how much their antics take so much away from other’s lives, including something as simple as allowing others to choose what they’d really like to be doing with their lives, rather than spending it putting out all the crisis fires that the Leo is compulsively and obliviously setting to the scenery.

This is more along the lines of how I understand being ‘self-absorbed’ to truly mean. Not as I’ve heard others understand it, where they think that simply talking about yourself means you’re self-absorbed. When the unhealthy Leo nouns and verbs are in this state of self-absorption, they are rendered incapable of giving of themselves because they are unaware of a world outside of them. Even in their attempts to help or give to others, it’s still really about them. It’s still about drawing focus or attention to them. It’s the perpetual “me” show.

Because Leo is the sign of the actor, they can be really good at looking & believing the part they are trying to play. Leo is also the sign of play and pretend. They really believe with all their heart that they are this role they are playing. So much so, they won’t listen to any talk of it being otherwise. This leads to the other unhealthy Leo issue, which is pride. Their pride won’t let them admit that maybe all of the stuff they’ve been making a big t0-do about, isn’t really as big of a deal after all. How do you gracefully back down and come back from all of the dramatic proclamations and declarations you’ve made over the years without completely losing face and the respect of everyone you know (including yourself)?

I do not envy the Leo nouns and verbs.

Leo is about being playful, loving you. There is a healthy focus of self. There *is* a need for attention and affection that Leo is so well known for. They’re just great big, fluffy kitties who can play a little too rough sometimes, but don’t *really* mean any harm. They’re just playing after all. It’s just their show is so good and seems so for real (even to them), that none of us would DARE call the Leo out on his stuff in the middle of the show unless you wanted to become a shredded and bloody cat toy that was shunned and labeled as heartless. (The irony of Leo ruling the heart).

So we give them what they want, all of our attention. Because if we don’t, they may ratchet up the ante to life and death scenarios. Yes, Pluto & Scorpio is involved in the Leo nouns and verbs in my life, but besides that, Leo is the sign of the creative Life Force. Life is one big dramatic show, which involves things such as Life and the Lack of Life. So it’s only fair that Leo have the same range to work with.

What follows Leo in the zodiac is Virgo. Virgo is the next step in the process of the progression of life in which we go from kids who are playing and pretending and who don’t have a care in the world, to learning how to start taking care of things. Brushing your teeth, getting regular rest. Paying the bills. Dusting the furniture. To Leo, that’s the equivalent of being a stick in the mud. That’s the opposite of the definition of fun. To some, it’s the equivalent of death. A life of routine and taking care of shit? No. I’d rather BE DEAD!

lol, oh Leo . . . always so dramatic.

Many people learn at some point in their teens that all of the drama llama isn’t worth it. Some people never learn it. Some are attempting to learn it dramatically, and some just get their own reality show. LOL. Reality.

Virgo. Virgo can be such a tender, gentle, soothing, caring, cuddle energy. Virgo cares. Really, really cares in ways that some people will never comprehend. They don’t do what they do for the glory, they do what they do for the sake of love. Well, that’s the aim of Virgo anyways. Once they get past their hypochondriac, obsessive compulsive, can’t see the forest for the trees phase. They see a wounded animal, they want to tend to it. They see a sad face, they want to comfort it. In Virgo, we find healing.

Among the Virgo nouns and verbs are many, many unsung heroes. A Virgo who is in their grace, will easily go unnoticed by all the Leo nouns and verbs who are still caught up in the “fun” show. The Virgo variety, when healthy themselves and grounded, will care and heal those around them without drawing attention to themselves or expecting anything in return. They may carry huge burdens within themselves and never speak of the pain they’ve known and witnessed, maybe even thinking they have nothing to complain about. They don’t want to be a bother or a burden to others, (which itself seems to be some leftover drama from Leos-ville) They see the Leo nouns and verbs carrying on like their hair is always on fire and they think to themselves, “Oh . . . no, my thing isn’t that bad. Best give them the attention, I’ll be okay.”

Which sets it up so that the ones who really do need the care and attention of others, are the very ones who would never call attention to themselves. And the very ones who are getting all of the attention, are the ones who could stand to be taken down a notch or two.

To the Virgo nouns and verbs, you need to quit trying to save every little wounded thing that wanders into your path. Trying to heal or save someone or something that has no wish to be saved or healed, is a total waste of your time. There are many, many out there who are less showy about their struggles and who could truly use the healing and nurturing energy that you have to give. If you spend your whole life on the one or two people who don’t really wish to leave their wounded story behind, then you miss out on the hundreds who really could’ve used your help and would have only needed a fraction of your time and attention. The ones who truly want or need help, are also not going to want to impose or be a burden and are able to make do with very, very little assistance.

Virgo, you have to learn how to let go of those who aren’t really interested in what you have to offer and who aren’t going to appreciate you. You also need to learn how to speak up a little louder about your own needs. It doesn’t actually do you any good to let others take and take from you without giving in return (at least without a fight). All it does is drain you of life, take from others who do need, and allows the other person to continue being a spoiled child (gimme your attention). Nobody really wins in that scenario.

To the Leo nouns and verbs, you need to get out of your own way. You need to recognize that as awesome as you are, there is a world and life full of other realities that exist separate from you. That there are many, many people who are suffering just as much, if not more than you, but don’t make a big show about it. That just because others appear to have it more together than you, doesn’t mean they do. Often times you don’t hear from them, because they’re busy being focused on actually doing something to improve their shithole life instead of focusing on making a big production out of it.

Leo, things can’t always be about having fun or about you. Fun without structure or responsibility is the recipe for a spoiled, self-absorbed brat. I don’t care how sweet and nice of a human you are or if that hurts your feelings. If you are being self-absorbed and obliviously creating situations that basically forces others to give you attention repeatedly and for extensive lengths of time, instead of them getting to focus on living the lives they were meant to, you are being a spoiled brat. If you were to grow up and take actual responsibility for yourself, you would prevent about 99.9% of your life’s drama, and maybe even understand what true happiness really feels like. (Hint: Happiness shouldn’t result in hangovers.)

I have been both the Leo & Virgo nouns and verbs, as well as been surrounded by both the Leo & Virgo nouns and verbs. I believe we all have the tendency, some more pronounced than others. All, and I do mean all, are very lovable and cuddly creatures underneath the drama and hurts and pains.

I’m just trying to do my Sun *job*, being a Gemini Sun/Jupiter conjunct, and reconcile duality and paradoxes. Stick little Gemini labels on them. Use my words to communicate and share what I’ve found or learned through personal experience, and make it available to anyone who may be searching for exactly that information to help grow or improve their lives, which in turn will automatically help improve the lives of others.

Also, my Saturn in Leo in the 5th is coming into play. Jupiter transited my natal Saturn last Wednesday. The taskmaster Saturn has been teaching me my whole life via the school of hard knocks how to be a grown up Leo. Which is hilarious because my sun/Jupiter in Gemini, along with the Leo emphasis means that I’m basically a great big kid. A great big, grown up kid who is all responsible and shit. Who has gone through a life of drama llama, but still came out the other end with an open heart.

I may talk a lot about myself, but I am not self absorbed. I do what I do consciously for both myself and for others. I love me, and I love you.